Housing stressors and persons with serious mental health problems

This paper describes the correlates and predictors of exposure to housing stressors among a sample of people with serious mental health problems and assesses the extent to which this experience detracts from their well-being in the community. Data were collected in a cross-sactional, two-city sample study conducted in two of New Zealand's largest cities, Auckland and Christchurch. Respondents were 203 former psychiatric inpatients, who, compared to random samples of the general population in the two cities, were younger, more often single, more residentially mobile, and more likely to be of ethnic minority status. Measures of respondents’ housing situations and standard demographic variables were collected, along with outcome measures including the World Health Organization Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) (Babor & Grant 1989) and the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) (Goldberg & Williams 1988). The principal housing problem in both cities was overcrowding. Coldness, cost and issues of maintenance were also of concern. Respondents could generally cite only passive coping strategies for dealing with these housing problems. Factor analysis was used to identify three housing stressor scales:‘physical condition’,‘cost’, and 'space/amenity’. Multiple regression analysis demonstrated that socio-economic factors are significant predictors of housing stressors, with those respondents most dependent on social welfare living in the worst dwellings, as measured by the‘physical condition’ scale. This scale had the strongest relationship with psychiatric distress, as measured by the GHQ. These results lead us to conclude that concerns with respect to housing for people with serious mental health problems must move beyond issued of availability and affordability and embrace the quality of housing.